Category Archives: Community prevention programs

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” – Frederick Douglass

Jane Halladay, director of the service systems program at the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, which developed the Think Trauma curriculum for staff members in juvenile correctional facilities, remembers a young man who was very difficult to handle, especially first thing in the morning.

When he woke up, it was as if he had just emerged from battling demons in his dreams. “He was extremely confrontational, aggressive, ready for a fight,” Halladay says. “In treatment, it came out that the staff woke people up by turning on and off the lights – and it came out that he had once been stabbed in the neck and had come to in the ambulance.

Jane Halladay

“They understood the impact,” she says. “They made it a policy to wake him up every morning before they turned on and off the lights. All of his behavioral issues completely disappeared. He was a completely different youth.”

This is important, because a high number of ACEs can cause chronic disease, mental illness, violence, being a victim of violence and early death. (See ACEs 101 for more information.)

After decades of get-tough policies that often morphed delinquent youth into hardened criminals – i.e., further traumatizing already traumatized kids — state, local and private facilities are developing ACE- and trauma-informed training for staff and systems for their facilities. They realize that the time these post-traumatic youth spend under their roofs can be a time for healing — if it’s handled right.

CHICAGO—Across the United States these days, it seems as if hardly a week goes by without a conference or a workshop about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and how people are implementing trauma-informed and resilience-building practices in their organizations — including schools, prisons, homeless shelters, hospitals, medical clinics, youth services or businesses.

This month ACEs and trauma conferences and workshops were held in Los Angeles, Santa Rosa and Pasadena, CA, in Dover, DE, Brainerd, MN, Austin, TX, and, the 2015 Midwest Regional Summit on Adverse Childhood Experiences held March 12-13 at Loyola University School of Law in Chicago.

Still, for most people – although probably not including the 140 attendees at the third annual conference hosted by the Illinois ACE Response Collaborative – their response is: “What are ACEs?” “What’s trauma-informed?” “What does resilience-building mean?”

Research has shown a direct link between childhood adversity — ACEs – and the adult onset of chronic disease, mental illness, violence and being a victim of violence, explained Wade, a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and member of the Philadelphia ACE Task Force. ACEs create mental and physical health risks that continue to crop up over a person’s lifetime if not adequately addressed.

These can include developmental delays early in life, mental health and academic achievement issues in childhood, involvement in the juvenile justice system, and alcohol and drug abuse as a youth and adult.

There are three ways to look at how the juvenile justice system is using modern practices to reduce youth crime and violence.

One is what happens on the way to the detention center where a kid is held until trial – i.e., how the system decides which kids must be locked up, and who can live at home or in a group home until their trial date.

The second is inside detention center walls – what happens to kids inside these mostly county-run centers while they’re awaiting trial.

The third is inside the correctional facilities where youth serve out their sentences. These are usually run by states.

Kenton Kirby (right), head of Make It Happen, smiles with colleague David Grant (left) and a youth in the program. Credit: Make It Happen

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By Samuel Lieberman

NEW YORK — It was dismissal time. Everyone had left the classroom, but John Sadler had to run back to pick up his backpack. Three of his classmates, boys who were constantly picking on Sadler, were blocking the door on his way out.

“What are you doing, are you stealing?” they asked.

Sadler, 13, knew they were trying to get a rise out of him. “I already knew what was going to happen,” he said.

The boys blocked his exit so he pushed them back forcefully with his stocky legs. He ran down the stairs but was no match for his swift pursuers.

“I got to the bottom of the steps and they jumped me right there,” Sadler said. “They were stomping on my knees, my ankles. They kicked me on my side.” Sadler limped to the shelter where he and his mother were staying.

His mother came to school the next day. “But I couldn’t tell them who did it,” he said. “‘Snitches get stitches’ they said, and I didn’t want that to be me.”

From left, Tynesha McHarris, director of community leadership at the Brooklyn Community Foundation, Renee Gregory, first assistant district attorney in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, and Krista Larson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s Center for Youth Justice, and Nell Bernstein, author of Burning Down the House. Credit: Meral Agish

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By Meral Agish

NEW YORK — When Nell Bernstein, the editor of a youth newspaper, looked at her staff, she saw bright young people at work. But in those years, the 1990s, some looked at those same faces and saw little more than a threat — and began to react with force.

Based on little other than appearance, these young people became victims of the “superpredator” theory. Bernstein described that as “a mythical creature with a hoodie and a black face, with no conscience, no spirit, no soul, who we were asked to believe lived in the bodies of our teenagers.”

Her staff members started getting arrested on their way to work. The arrests got so frequent that some quit, saving themselves from exposure to further targeting.

For Bernstein, seeing her young colleagues unfairly profiled in this way led her to act. In the decades since, juvenile justice reform has become a core theme in her investigative reporting.

A play from the Off the Hook kids’ program put on by the Falconworks Artist Group twice a year. (Photo by Levi Sharpe)

By Levi Sharpe

NEW YORK — The houselights went up, dimly illuminating the sea-foam green wall tiles and 40 audience members spread out on cracked wooden seats in the auditorium of P.S. 15 in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

“Can any of you tell me a problem that someone was having?” asked Reg Flowers, as he stood in front of the stage where the actors now sat.

The children sitting in the two front rows raised their hands, some quickly, others with hesitation.

Falconworks Artist Group, a theater group based in Red Hook, has been producing “Off the Hook” for the past 10 years, said founder Reg Flowers, 48. He and co-founder Chris Hammett, 49, put on the eight-week program twice a year to help neighborhood kids channel their problems into workshopped plays that they then write and star in.

After the performance, Flowers encourages audience members to go up on stage and act out their own

“Prayer Time in the Nursery–Five Points House of Industry” by Jacob Riis. Residential nursery 1888.

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The dirty little secret about family courts – where kids and parents who’ve entered the child welfare system end up – is that they often make things worse, especially for the youngest children — from newborns to five-year-olds.

It’s not intentional – child welfare systems and family courts were set up to help children and their families. But traditional family courts can further traumatize kids already suffering from adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) by moving them from one foster care home to another, by rarely letting them see their parents (if parents are willing and able), or by leaving them to languish in foster care limbo for years before finding them a permanent home. All this contributes to these children developing chronic diseases when they’re adults, as well as mental illness, violence and being a victim of violence.